The underground cave was collapsing inward.
With Patriarch Bai Hua dead, the spiritual deep ring binding the limestone pillars shattered like dried pine needles.
Boulders the size of ox-carts rained from the arched ceiling three hundred feet above, crashing into the stale bile pools with bone-shaking, ear-splitting detonations.
The air was white with powdered chalk, sulfur gas, and the screaming fury of the Mother-Gu Queen.
She was forty feet of living siege engine.
Her segmented thorax, armored in overlapping plates of dark violet hard shell four inches thick, scraped against the cave walls with the sound of grinding iron gears.
Thirty pairs of hook-tipped legs gouged deep trenches through the granite floor. It tore away tons of bedrock in an uncontrollable frenzy of grief and hunger.
Her symbiotic connection to the sect patriarch had been cut.
